Monastery of the Holy Cross

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: The Second and Third Precautions Against the World

(Here is the Introduction to this series and the First Precaution.)

The second precaution against the world regards the attraction that temporal goods have for us. A family has certain financial needs that a religious does not.  But for the lay person, as well as for the religious, it is a question of distinguishing needs from desires.

The last precaution against the world is to guard ourselves against thinking about events in the community. “Never be scandalized or astonished at anything you happen to see or learn of, endeavoring to preserve your soul in forgetfulness of all that.” “Even if you should live among [literal] devils you should not turn the head of your thoughts to their affairs, but…strive to keep your soul occupied purely and entirely in God.”

This aside about devils opens up an interesting clue to the meaning of this precaution. If you call to mind the famous drawing by Martin Schongauer of Saint Antony’s temptations, you will remember that the demons are poking at the saint, pulling his beard and so on. And he is completely tranquil and serene in the center of all this mischief. We are familiar with interpreting this in terms of thoughts. For example, when we pray, are we not immediately pushed and pulled in all directions by distractions? And does not the monastic tradition teach us that these distracting thoughts are, much more often than not, the product of demonic intrusion? The remedy is simply to return to the Psalms, or whatever meditation we have undertaken.

Now, Saint John Cassian says that the hermit fights the devil one on one. But the cenobite, the monk in community, fights the devil in his brothers. Does not this suggest that the distracting behavior of my brother is an occasion for the devil to turn my thoughts away from God? John of the Cross agrees: “There is never a lack of devils who seek to overthrow the saints; God permits this [state of affairs] in order to prove and try religious.”

John makes it clear that one of the most problematic temptations is to speak about what we’ve seen with another monk. He says that we should never do this. When we fail in this way, do we not often excuse ourselves ahead of time by claiming that we are acting out of love and concern? At a minimum, before we say anything, we might ask these questions. If the brother is truly in danger or is truly endangering others, who should know about it? Who would have the authority to address it? And then, how likely is it that the person in authority, abbot or novice master or whoever is the overseer in this case, doesn’t know what’s happening? How motivated am I, really, by love for the brother? Is it likely that I am in fact motivated by my own demand for others not to impinge on my peace of mind?

Now apply all that I’ve said to the hyper-reactive world of social media!

Once again, we see that the “worldliness” in this case is about a certain level of comfort, safety and self-insulation, a need to control my environment rather than adapt. We see also a way of identifying the three enemies of the soul with the three parts of the soul. The flesh clearly refers to temptations that arise from the concupiscible part of the soul. The devil, who we said earlier is connected to the intellect, refers to temptations that afflict the rational part of the soul. And the middle part of the soul, the irascible, is that part that deals with danger, discomfort and so on. Is it not often the case that when we feel the need to speak about something scandalous or merely annoying that we are moved by anger or sadness? God gave us anger to drive away true temptations, not to drive a wedge between ourselves and other. And sadness is a sign that something that we valued is being taken away. It is an invitation to let go of identifying myself with that imagined good, to open within myself a space for the True Good, Jesus Christ Himself. The world would encourage our false self to just such identifications, and the false self by its nature wishes to separate from others. Thus the devil puts us at odds, labeling others as either friends or enemies, depending on whether they can provide us with the goods to which we are accustomed or which we feel are our due. The true self, the life of Christ within, grows by constantly opening itself to a divine perspective, a boundless love that gives without counting the cost and has compassion on all.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: The First Precaution Against the World

(Here is the Introduction to this series.)

I have already noted that the world, which shows itself an enemy through the middle part of the soul, especially afflicts the will.  This is our ability to choose goods based not on immediate desire, but on an apprehension of a future benefit or danger. The will is also the faculty that loves—love being a choice rather than a rational thought or a base desire.

And indeed, in his short work The Precautions, Saint John of the Cross immediately identifies love as the arena of the combat with the world. His first question to those who would do battle with the world is, “Whom shall we love?”

John recommends loving no one person more than another, and forgetfulness of all particular affections or hatreds. Do not think about others, neither good things nor bad.

This is sound monastic doctrine, though difficult in practice. Let’s begin with the very challenging teaching that we should not love one person more than another. This derives directly from the gospel. Jesus says that if we do not approach Him without hating father and mother, we cannot be His disciples. So John is channeling one of Jesus’s most difficult teachings.

Part of the difficulty is that there are relationships whose very nature incurs a certain debt, often mutual, but sometimes in one direction. For example, children are commanded to honor their fathers and mothers. This must be done whether one loves one’s parents or not. We show honor not because we love our parents more than others (though that may be the case), but because honor is the correct disposition toward a parent. This discipline of honor allows us to follow the teaching of Saint Peter, who says in his First Letter that we should honor all. By practicing honor toward certain persons, we can learn to transfer that honor to all persons.

This opens a way to understand what it might mean to love everyone with the same intensity. Loving a specific person is not necessarily the obstacle that it at first appears to be. The question is: will this love I feel and then exercise toward this person, who is God’s gift to me, will this love instruct me on how to treat everyone else? When I have discovered what it means to love one person, can I discipline myself to treat others as if I loved them? When I interact with someone whom I find disagreeable, I can ask, “How would I treat this person if I loved him or her the way I love my best friend?”

I believe that parenthood has a built in pedagogy here. Parents know that it is impossible to love every child the same way. But one must love each child in some sense equally. This requires a deep interest in knowing their nascent personhood, the specific needs of each child. In other words, parents must learn how to love the correct way for each child.

When we begin to open up this love toward others, I want to offer one of my own precautions. We are not talking about letting other persons determine us, and certainly not toxic persons. Love for someone making very poor choices can take the form of “tough love,” letting the person experience the pain that comes from poor choices. Even the incarceration of a criminal can be seen, if done properly, as an act of love, for it prevents the criminal from committing further acts that damage the soul. In any case, I am advocating for a clear-eyed love, not enmeshment with everyone else’s failings. This is why John also says that we must have equal forgetfulness of all persons. We must know where our feelings end and theirs begin, where we can reasonably be expected to help, and where our help means getting drawn into responsibility for unhealthy behavior.

It is interesting that we are commanded to honor our parents rather than to love them. On the other hand, we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus famously reinterprets the idea of a neighbor in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The neighbor is a person who incurs a certain type of debt, actually a kind of “reverse debt,” something owed to another who is the one in need, and who happens to be near me. In such a circumstance, I am invited to become the tangible mercy and compassion of God toward the poor, the sick, and the abandoned, simply because God put me there.

Let’s note in completing this meditation that every person we meet each day has experienced hurt, disappointment, injury—the list could go on and on. We can’t really know the extent to which that person needs compassion, a kind word, maybe just forbearance. And so he is my neighbor, the one to whom I owe love.

In what sense is the world the enemy in these expressions of honor and love? The world has fallen under the domination of the devil, the diabolos, the one who divides. Particular love and honor, as I have hinted, is given to us by God as a part of His pedagogy. It is when we want to hold onto that love and use it for our own purposes of comfort, pleasure, safety, or whatever, that it causes us to become possessive and to separate. We can attempt to build up a world centered on ourselves, based on our preferences. This is the hostile face of “the world”:  when we seek division based on our own judgments and not God’s.

The second part of John’s exhortation tells us not to think about others. Do we not again need to do this sometimes? Doesn’t a novice master or a teacher need to think about the character of the novice or student in order best to love him and serve his needs for conversion and growth? Do we not need to think about others any time we engage in a cooperative action?

Here is where John’s exhortation to think neither good nor bad comes in. He is exhorting us to evaluate the person not in a moral sense. Any such judgment will be ill-informed and biased. Rather, there are situations where love indeed requires us to make prudential judgments about the best way to interact with specific persons. Here’s the rub: it is extremely difficult to parse the difference between the moral judgment and the practical judgment.

I believe that the distinction arises from how the thought affects me. Does the thought of the other person’s character and assumed motivations move me to change my own approach and dispositions to adapt myself to that person? Or is my first thought to demand that the other person change?

Saint Benedict confirms this approach when he teaches that the abbot must adapt himself to each monk’s character and intelligence. An abbot is someone who really must think about others, as any father must think about his children. But the result of this thought, in the case of an abbot, is not first of all a demand that the monk change, but rather is a discovery of inadequacy in oneself. Or if we put this positively, it is an opportunity to grow in self-knowledge and wisdom.

Homily for Gaudete Sunday

If you have a feeling of déjà vu at this morning’s liturgy, what might be the cause? Obviously, it’s not the rose vestments, which we haven’t worn since March.

Do you remember what the gospel was last week? It was John the Baptist, the voice crying out in the desert, and, Matthew says, “All Judea and the whole region around the Jordan were going to him.” Today, John is no longer in the desert, but is in prison. And it is in prison that he hears about the works of Christ, which he had predicted last week.

Except there is a difference.

Last week, when speaking of one mightier than he, John said of the Messiah, “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand….the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” So, it’s interesting that this week, when he asks Jesus whether He is one, Jesus doesn’t quite answer directly.

And it’s not an invalid question. After all, we don’t see—or we seem not to see—Jesus with a winnowing fan in his hand, even metaphorically. Where is the wheat and the chaff?

Instead, Jesus responds with a strong paraphrase of Isaiah chapter 35, today’s first reading. And this is interesting. Who is effecting these cures in Isaiah? The first two verbs are in the passive voice: eyes will be opened, ears will be cleared. This is what is sometimes known as the divine passive. Isaiah does not specify who is opening the eyes of the blind. It magically happens.

But we know that this happens when God comes to save His people. “Here is your God…he comes to save you.” That’s when eyes get opened.

So that’s Jesus’s response: if eyes are opened and the lame are walking, then God must have come to save His people. So, was John wrong? Did he have the wrong Messiah?

Of course, this can’t be the case, because the gospels go out of their way to underline the Baptist’s importance as the one who prepares the people and gives witness to Jesus.

The Fathers of the Church struggled with this passage, where John doesn’t seem to know whether Jesus is the Messiah. Did he not hear the voice from heaven pronouncing Jesus the Son of God at His baptism? What they noticed about this episode is that John is not asking Jesus a question directly; he is sending his disciples with the question.

Is it possible that they were the ones who were taking offense? That the Messiah appears bearing mercy, healing, and forgiveness rather than condemnation? This is a good explanation, I think, but it just shifts the burden.

If Jesus is the one who is to come, when are we going to see the winnowing fan, the wheat gathered and the chaff burned?

This is the second surprise. If the first is that the Messiah is not only a human king, but is God Himself, the second is that baptism by the Holy Spirit makes us not only human, but sons and daughters of God by adoption.

The chaff that is to be threshed out and burned is our sins, our worldliness, all that would make us unfit to be God’s heirs.

What about the wheat? Would this not be everything good that God has given us, and every effort, however small, that we have made to say, “Yes,” to do God’s will?

Oftentimes it feels as if our good deeds go unnoticed. Or when they are noticed, others respond with mild cynicism or outright cynicism.

We do good, hoping to build up all that is good in the world, and it seems like evil goes on its way unconcerned. It is as if our good deeds limp, a good word meets a deaf ear. God’s beautiful creatures are obscured, eyes are blind to the stars hidden behind streetlights, living things perish and decay.

This is where Jesus comes to set things right. In His kingdom, which is not of this world, he will have gathered up all those efforts at fidelity. They will no longer Iimp, but will dance before us, and all good words that were uttered will become a song of joy and praise. The dead will be raised, and there will be no tears or pain in that new world, which God wishes to be ours, that world in which even the least is greater than John the Baptist.

Why would we take offense at this? Why would John’s disciples have taken offense?

I believe they were hoping to divide the world between the good people, namely the people of the covenant, and the bad people, like the Romans and their collaborators. Would we not at times also like to see our opponents get burned—at least a little bit—for causing suffering to others?

If we do not see ourselves as lame and blind, at least in some sense, are we not prone to rancor when the undeserving receive mercy and healing? We will answer this with the words of Saint James: “Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another, that you may not be judged.”

If we can welcome each other as Christ has welcomed the least deserving, we will have that much more wheat to bring to God and that much less chaff to be burned away.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction

Saint Paul writes to the Ephesians:

“You [Christ] made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Among these we all once lives in the passions of our flesh.”

This is the most immediate scriptural citation behind the traditional formulation of the three enemies of the soul, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. This is one of the traditional means of distinguishing between the spirits opposed to God and the Holy Spirit, and by the High Middle Ages, we see this triad quoted by Saint Thomas Aquinas as something widely known and accepted in Catholic moral theology.

Saint Paul says that we once walked in the course of this world, the first enemy. The second, the prince of the power of the air, refers to a belief that demons inhabited the air between earth and heaven, and prevented our ascent there. We see this in icon of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, where monks are attempted to climb to heaven, but are being pulled at, and even at times pulled down by flying demons.

Finally, Paul mentions the passions of the flesh.

In a series of upcoming posts, I will be meditating on these three enemies of the soul: the world, the flesh, and the devil. I will be making use of the thinking of Saint John of the Cross, who does a brief exposition of them in a short work called The Precautions. This is written for cloistered religious, and I plan to follow it pretty carefully, making some suggestions about how we might adapt it to the lay state, and I hope that our later discussion can be an opportunity to flesh out how best to make this adaptation.

In this work, he says that the world is the enemy least difficult to conquer, and so we will happily begin our reflection there. But by way of introduction, I will say a bit more in general about the three enemies.

John of the Cross goes on say that the devil is the hardest to understand, and the flesh is the most tenacious.

In his formulation, we can see that defeating the devil requires purification of the intellect, and battling the flesh the purification of the lower appetites, which leaves the higher appetite of the will as the field of combat against the world.

In traditional monastic spiritual theology, which follows on that of Plato and Aristotle, the soul is divided into three parts. The highest is the rational, and the lowest is called the concupiscible. In the middle is the irascible. If we work our way up, we discover that the concupiscible appetites are those of pleasure and a sort of mindless self-preservation, the interior physical needs of the body. The thoughts connected with this part of the soul are primarily gluttony and lust, though avarice is partly connected to this lower part of the soul.

The middle part of the soul regards our relationships to persons and to good and evil. This irascible part used anger to fend off danger and sadness to remind us of previous mistakes and losses. Under the power of sin, we mistakenly use anger against other persons and sadness against others who we feel deprive us in some way. It culminated in sloth or accedia, a kind of abandonment of any spiritual ideal. This is the area we will be looking at in the next post.

Finally, the rational part manifests itself in pride and vainglory.

Homily for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

The Book of Genesis starts off on a very high note. God creates all things and finds them good, even very good. Adam and Eve, our first parents, are given paradise for their home. It is a vision of a world in which evil does not exist: plants spring up from the well-watered ground, animals help the man and woman to keep the garden.

As we all know, this does not last very long.  I believe Dante suggests that it lasted about half an hour.

In today’s first reading, we hear the tail-end of the story of man’s transgression, the attempt to attain wisdom in a manner contrary to God’s intentions. This begins a dismal series of chapters in which humankind goes from bad to worse, to the point that God laments ever making man because the thoughts of man’s heart is only evil continually.

It feels like that line from Genesis describes much of our world today. God never gave up on us, and so he began His great plan of redemption by calling Abraham to leave the world of idolatry. There was a long road ahead for Abraham’s progeny. We see that every time God sends a blessing, there is a corresponding resistance, even rebellion.

Eventually, the people of Israel go into exile, and the temple is destroyed. This marks a new approach: more and more, the people of Judah look to respond to God by a humble submission to His law, not seeking the power of kings, but seeking renewal interiorly.

Instead of having thoughts entirely on evil, meditating on God’s law, day and night. This was a good strategy, since God had promised blessings to those who kept His law in their hearts.

What I am describing here is the gradual training of the people of Israel to cooperate with God’s grace. This was a challenge because the rest of the world didn’t know God and went about with its wars and industries, measuring success by worldly standards while Israel became more and more negligible.

But this was all a part of God’s plan. He was seeking one person who would truly say, “Yes,” with a pure heart. And so, to an aging couple, whom we call Joachim and Anne, God gave the gift of a daughter who would be that perfect response to God’s invitation to know Him and love Him.

The covenant with Abraham, that agreement between two parties, is brought to fruition through one who will say, “May it be done to me according to your word.” It is at this moment God finally enters His creation to save it from within.

Today’s solemnity of the Immaculate Conception is not just a celebration of this event, but a reminder that each of us through baptism is part of the same drama of salvation. Each of us, in saying “Yes” to God’s invitation and pledging ourselves to Him in baptism, has brought Christ into the world in our own hearts. We are now striving to bring Him to birth by becoming saints. As Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception was prepared for by generations of humble, anonymous men and women, we are beneficiaries of generations of Christians who have striven to be faithful to Christ.

Seeing God’s hand in this history and recognizing His many gifts to us, let us respond to His invitation and say, “Yes,” with our whole heart.

Homily for the Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Today we celebrate the Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the temple. Our knowledge of this event is taken not from the canonical Scriptures, but from an important text, called the “Protoevangelium of James,” written in about the year 150. The Protoevangelium also gives us the names of Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anna. The book is an excellent witness to the importance of the Blessed Virgin in the earliest decades of the Church. We see the earliest Christians reflecting on her role in God’s plan, requiring her to be set apart. Like the prophet Samuel, she is dedicated by her parents to God, to live in the temple and serve the priests who ministered at God’s altar. One of young Mary’s tasks was to weave the temple veil, the veil that would be rent at Jesus’s death.

The Church has always seen in this dedication of the Virgin Mary a foreshadowing of consecrated life. Those called by God to leave the world are to live, like Mary or the apostles after Pentecost, in the temple, praising God at all times. There, we wait upon God’s will, and following the pattern of Mary’s motherhood, we dedicate ourselves to welcoming the life of Christ given at baptism. With the help of God’s grace, we aim to bring that divine life to term by a life of sanctity and purity of heart.

Today we also conclude the monastery’s annual retreat. As it happens, this year’s retreat is shorter than usual, as we are planning to move it back to February. But it has been unusual in many other ways, and perhaps not as quiet and reflective as most of us would have chosen. This might be a reminder from God that no life of sanctity comes without a struggle to accept what is. It might be a reminder that as monks, we can’t afford to use the retreat as a time to “refuel” before we get back to work. We have to be the ones in the Church who say “no” to whatever distracts us from our primary purpose of serving God alone. Is there a difference in kind between withdrawal from the world and retreat? I think that they are both the same thing, differing only in degree. If God has seen to it that we haven’t had as much time for spiritual exercises this week as we would have hoped, this is perhaps a reminder that, for us, spiritual exercises must come first at all times, and not just on retreat.

I don’t want to be too elliptical for our guests: Fr. Edward is doing fine after having surgery on Wednesday night, and while he has a lot of rehab ahead of him, we have reason to expect him back. Other distractions have been more elective, and, as I say, a spur to imitate more fully the example of Our Lady: to put our own plans to the side and say, “Let it be done to me according to your will,” so that we may be a true sign to the Church that God’s will is our peace and not any accomplishment of our own. For whoever does the will of Jesus’s heavenly Father is His brother, sister, and mother, kindred of all the saints in heaven and destined for eternal life.

Homily for the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome

Today, as we celebrate the anniversary of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, it seems like a good moment to reflect on the subject of ecclesiology. Ecclesiology means the study of the ecclesia, the Church.

What is the Church? What does it mean to be a member of the Church? These questions are not as easy to answer as we might think at first blush.

For example, when we ask what the Church is, the answers that we get from theologians vary, depending on the perspective from which we view the Church. It is the mystical Body of Christ. It is the sacrament of salvation for the world. It is the People of God, or the Perfect Society, through which we, the members, receive grace and are sanctified and perfected in union with our shepherds, the bishops, under the special care of the Holy Father, Christ’s vicar on earth. And of course, any one of these “models” is itself a mystery, and therefore open to ongoing reflection.

I would like to offer the idea of the Church as a kind of fractal, just to make things at first even more mysterious and perhaps overly complicated.

What is a fractal? In certain popular usages of the term, it refers to a shape that is made up of several connected versions of the same shape on a smaller level. Imagine, for example, a snowflake, with it six points. Now imagine taking six of the same snowflakes and connecting them around a center so that it makes a new hexagonal snowflake. And imagine that this new snowflake has the same shape as each of the six smaller snowflakes. That’s what I mean by fractal in the case. As we zoom our or zoom in, we see the same shape emerge each time. That shape is repeated at different levels.

So, there is one Church, as we say in the Creed. That is because Christ Himself is the One mediator between God and Man, and the Church is His Body and His Bride. There can only be one Bride for Christ and that is the Church.

Now, a brief side note on the Lateran Basilica. Just over two thousand years ago, in the City of Rome, there was a family that had recently become a part of the wealthy class in pagan Rome, and their name was the Lateran family. They built a palace on the site of what is today the Lateran Basilica. This palace was confiscated by the Emperor Nero and became part of the government’s property. Three hundred years later, when the Emperor Constantine became Christian, he donated that former palace to the pope at the time, Pope Miltiades, and it became the seat of the bishop of Rome. The building was destroyed several times, and the current building was built over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the fourteenth centuries, the building was destroyed by two fires while the pope had moved his administration to the city of Avignon in France. When Saint Catherine of Siena persuaded Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome, he found the Lateran Basilica completely in ruins. So he moved his administration to Saint Peter’s Basilica on the Vatican hill, and this is where the pope continues to exercise his governance of the Church. However, the Lateran remains the cathedral church of Rome, and therefore is the Mother Church of the entire Roman Catholic world. Hence our celebration today. It is a sign of the unity of the Church under one pope, and a sign of the Incarnation, inasmuch as there can be only one Mother cathedral, and for God’s purposes, He chose Rome to be the home of this church.

Now, let’s return to the idea of a fractal. So, you remember that I said that when either zoom in or zoom out, we see the same shape emerge. This is what we find in the ecclesiology, when we look at the Church. When we zoom all the way out, we see the universal Church, with billions of members all around the world and in heaven and in purgatory. A glorious sight to be sure.

But when we zoom in, we don’t find an isolated “piece” of the larger Church. We find a diocese. And at the head of the diocese is the Bishop. And by dint of his ordination as bishop, he is just as much a successor of the Apostles as is the bishop of Rome. One of the principles vigorously enunciated at the Second Vatican Council is that each bishop receives his power and authority directly from Christ, not from the pope. The pope receives particular powers reserved to him, but the normal powers of a bishop, to teach and preach, to celebrate the sacraments, and to govern the Church, comes directly from Christ. This means that each diocese is, in some way, the fullness of the Church in a local, miniature setting. The whole, single, Church is present, and this is especially visible when the bishop celebrates the sacraments. For Christ is acting in the fullness of His power through the bishop.

Now, if we zoom in yet another level, we get to the parish. Again, the parish is not simply a piece of the diocese. There is, again, a sense that the fullness of the Church is present locally, through Christ’s ministry, now through the instrument of the priest. Now, we should say that the parish is a more inadequate symbol or instantiation of the universal Church. For example, a priest cannot celebrate the sacraments without the permission and mandate of his bishop, and certain sacraments are reserved to the bishop, such as ordination or the consecration of an altar. Certain decisions belong to the bishop. But even if the picture is slightly dimmed, this does not mean that the fullness of the Church is not actually present when the priest acts in the person of Christ, whether teaching governing or sanctifying.

This fractal nature of the Church is denoted by the fact that we celebrate three church dedications each year. Today we celebrate the Church’s unity at the highest level. On October 11 each year, we celebrate the dedication of the diocesan cathedral, in our case the archdiocesan cathedral of Holy Name downtown. And last but definitely not least, we celebrate the dedication of each parish or religious church. In our case, this is on October 24. And this celebration at the most local level is the highest-ranking, liturgically speaking, of the three.

This means that while today’s celebration is a feast in this church, in Rome it is a solemnity, the highest-ranking category of a liturgical celebration. This once more connects us to the Incarnation. It is God who has chosen to consecrate this place to Himself, and it is likewise God Who chose to consecrate the Lateran basilica. He does this to deepen His relationship with the actual people who come here. But we are never, for that reason, isolated from the other churches. We recall on this day each year that our small community is not just a piece of the universal Church, but in some way makes present the entirety of the Church, which is best understood from the perspective of the ministry of unity given to Saint Peter and his successors.

So, we can give thanks to God this day for calling us to be members of His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, and for reminding us that what we see here, however humble it may appear, is in fact an opening to the grand and glorious city of the redeemed, an opening to the kingdom where we hope to enjoy God’s glory forever. Amen.

Homily for the Solemnity of the Anniversary of the Dedication of the Church

[The dedication of our church took place on June 19, 1910.  The monastery now transfers the Solemnity of the Anniversary of the Dedication to October 24.]

The Church’s liturgical directives instruct us to celebrate each year the anniversary of the dedication of the church building. This year we celebrate 115 years since this building became what Saint Benedict calls an oratory: a place consecrated to prayer. Saint Benedict goes on to say that the oratory should be what it is called: we come here to pray.

Eleven years ago, Cardinal George consecrated our new altar, and so we had a smaller-scale experience of what a church dedication looks like. The first thing to notice about it is that it can only be done by a bishop, in other words, by someone who is a part of the line of apostolic succession. A bishop is the spiritual descendant of those men upon whom Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit, commissioning them to teach, govern, and sanctify. The bishops share this commission with their helpers, the priests and deacons, but the most important actions are reserved for the bishops, who bear the fullness of Christ’s sacramental priesthood.

When any item is blessed, it is set apart in some way as dedicated to God, and therefore it bears something of God’s holy presence. Holy water, for example, can drive out the simpler demons. When we were baptized, we were set aside for God, and God took up residence in our souls. When this happens, it is as if a light goes on inside us, and we become spiritually alive. Certain latent powers, rooted in the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, are activated and begin to grow. This illumination that takes place is signified by the candle, lit from the Easter candle, Christ Himself, and given to the newly baptized.

When a priest is ordained, this process takes on a specific contour: not only is God present in the soul of a priest, but Christ now promises to act through the priest in specific ways. Again, a certain latent potency in a man is activated, and God’s sanctifying power now manifests itself in the priest changing the elements of the Eucharistic sacrifice into Christ’s Body and Blood, to note the most radical example.

And so it was with this church, when the bishop anointed its walls and the stone of the altar. In the case of our new altar, the relics of Saint Benedict and Saint Vincent of Saragossa were buried inside it, incense was placed on the altar, and finally a candle. And at this point this building came alive spiritually, as it were, and became God’s dwelling place. Every time we light the candles at the altar, we recall this in a profound way—this is one reason why the Eucharist is never celebrated without the candles being lit.

When the lights come on in the Church, or when the sun streams in through the stained glass windows, we see signs that this is a holy place. The images, the altar and the canopy above it, called a reredos, the twelve columns signifying the twelve apostles: these are those latent objects that become illuminated, alive with God’s presence because they are in a holy space. And all this ornamentation is meant to show us who we are as a Church. For we are being built into God’s dwelling, we are the stones being sanctified.

There is so much to dwell on in this theology, but time being limited, let me offer two brief final observations.

First of all, you are aware that this building has undergone a lot of repair in the last few years. In this world that has become infected with sin, objects are subject to decay and decomposition if they are not regularly repaired and renewed. Sometimes this work requires vigorous scraping, even removal of decayed brick and wood, before new brick, wood, and paint can restore the original beauty. This is a sign for our souls: sin has caused all of us to lose the original glory that Adam and Eve enjoyed in the garden. But God’s rescue mission is restoring this glory and spiritual beauty. Sometimes this requires scraping and extraction from us of improper attachments and so on, and this can be painful. In our suffering, it’s important to set our eyes on the goal, which is the beauty and glory that we will enjoy for all eternity with God and the saints. A beautiful church assists us by giving us a glimpse of what this will be like.

Which brings me to my second point. For this encouragement to take root in us, it is helpful to expose ourselves to it. The brothers will tell you that I frequently remind them not to close their eyes at the liturgy. I don’t bring this up to shame anyone, but to point out that in our modern context, our tendency is to seek God within ourselves, and more or less exclusively within ourselves. I have already said that He dwells within us because of baptism, so this is not entirely wrong. But interiorly, we are not yet fully purified, or at least I’m not, and I’m guessing that most of us aren’t. All the visual, aural, and olfactory cues in the church, dedicated to God’s glory, remind us that the goal of salvation is much greater than ourselves. Not only that, but the church is a symbol for a well-ordered soul, and therefore helps us to know how to identify God’s presence within us. What should we look like interiorly? Are we ornamented with images of salvation history and the examples of the saints? Is the incense of constant prayer filling us? Are we offering regular sacrifice to God upon the altar of our hearts? How might we grow as Catholics by today’s celebration? How might the illumination of our souls bring God to the world today?

Natural contemplation, the meaning of creatures, and the end of the virtues

When I initially read Cassian’s first Conference, I found the discussion there of the goal (scopos) and end (telos) of the monk to be interesting but not particular engaging on a personal level. Over the years, as I re-read it, it occurred to me that the problem was the entire worldview that formed me. This worldview sees no goals to anything in the cosmos, depicting it as the open-ended development of initial conditions and inputs of force and motion. That matter and energy happened to produce human beings, gemstones, scorpions and tornadoes is a quirky and ultimately inexplicable part of this random development.

It was through reading Dante, Charles Williams, Chesterton and MacIntyre that I gradually came to understand the perfections of creatures, first on an intellectual level of assent, and eventually at the level of the heart, of appreciation and gratitude. This helped to open up for me what Evagrius calls natural contemplation: the graced ability to see creatures from the spiritual perspective, the perspective of God and the angels, the perspective of eternity.

Natural contemplation means accepting that creatures have meaning. They have ways of flourishing and ways of failing to flourish. We participate in God’s life-giving grace when we work towards this flourishing—or even simply allow it to happen, take note of it, and give God glory.

An example that I have frequently used to illustrate this is that knives are meant for cutting things, and they work best when we understand the type of knife that we are holding. When we use a serrated knife with the right pressure, allowing the blade to gain purchase on the bread crust, we can gently guide it, according to its nature, through the bread. But when we use it like a guillotine, pressing straight down until the piece of food pops apart, the knife, as if objecting to being handled incorrectly, issues a loud report from the plate (which is perhaps also objecting to our misuse of its nature).

We go a step further when we use a knife as if it were a screwdriver or prybar. Sadly, this is a common mistake, to judge by the number of knives in our kitchen that are missing tips. But it is an outgrowth, even if a somewhat trivial one, of a worldview that gives objects no meaning, no goal, no nature. Since they have no inherent telos, we are free to make use of them as our wills desire. And so a knife becomes a screwdriver, and in secular culture men become women and women men.

If we lack the ability to be receptive to the goal or end of other creatures, is it really a surprise that we struggle to see our own lives as goal-driven? Human beings flourish in predictable ways. We will move toward this type of flourishing life not by examining our inner movements, but by attending to objective standards like the virtues.

All of the activities of the monastery gain their worth from what they contribute to a growth in virtue and an awareness of our final destination. At the judgement, God will not ask us if we got our work done on such and such a date, but if we labored to serve our neighbor in love, or if we sacrificed ourselves for the poor. We will not be asked if we were true to ourselves, because who we are in Christ is something beyond our ability to discern at the moment.

Fr. Timothy recently mentioned a reading from Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She says that, at the end times, God will reveal our proper name to us: we won’t understand fully who we are until then. But virtue will help offer us glimpses along the way. If we are growing in virtue, we are more likely to understand creatures from a proper theological perspective. If we are growing in virtue, we are more likely to be asked to step out of our present comfort zone and take up a task that will stretch us, perhaps quite a lot. But if we lack virtue, others will be reluctant to give us those opportunities to learn whether we have the skill to serve the community and the Church at a new level.

Liturgy and Rationalism

When I was younger, I wrote a lot of poetry. Often it took the form of song lyrics. But sometimes it was just poetry for its own sake, because I love poetry. One of the things about writing a lot when you’re young is that your work sticks around. You can read it when you get old and think, “This wasn’t very good.” Or more importantly, “This reveals more about me than I realized at the time. I didn’t recognize that feeling or insight for what it really was.” Occasionally, you discover, “Oh, there is actually an insight here that I didn’t even know I had at the time.” This comes about because, when we’re trying to make poetry work, we’re not using just our rational faculties. We’re using a certain kind of intuition, a felt, tactile sense of reality. We want to feel how the words fit together and create a rhythm together. When we’re writing poetry, we’re accessing our embodiedness in a way that we don’t when we’re writing an essay or an instructional manual.

I believe that an analogous process has taken place in the Liturgy. As Catholics, we profess that the Holy Spirit guides the Church in its development, and therefore that He also guides the development of the Liturgy. The Liturgy was assembled over many centuries by different people working in different places under different influences. These people made choices whose consequences none of them could have anticipated. The Holy Spirit may have inspired them to move in some way, knowing that a certain intuition would bear fruit 300 years later. Also, new people arose over time, bringing new insights. One example is William Durandus, a prominent medieval commentator on the Liturgy. Today, not everyone agrees that his works serve as a good critical resource for understanding the meaning of the Liturgy. But they do provide a snapshot in time: what people in the 14th century understood the Liturgy to be. This is different from what people in the 11th century thought or people in the 21st century think. To a certain extent, each period’s insights are valid, and we can learn from them all.

The problem with rationalism is that it takes an abstract schema—for instance, revealed truths, arranged in a certain order—and then imposes that on the Liturgy. It gives us the illusion of control over the Liturgy and tempts us to exercise it. But it misses the intuitive aspects that were put there either deliberately by human choice or unknowingly under the influence of the Holy Spirit.

This is a challenge for the Church in our time. The reforms that happened after Vatican II were infected with rationalism. But rationalism was never sufficient to the task of comprehending and communicating the mystery that the Liturgy celebrates. This is why it’s important that we access earlier versions of the Liturgy and use them to help us understand the current one.

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